Business Process Automation: Grow Your Company and Increase Profitability

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There are many business activities which are completely essential, yet kind of tedious to do. As human beings, most of us seek out work which challenges our creativity, problem solving abilities, or our desire to learn. There are many more interesting, fulfilling things we’d rather do than tasks like entering data from online forms into business applications or submitting proposals or contracts for approval. For managers, approving these documents can be an unnecessary distraction in a busy day.

In the sales office, an agent might move a sales stage forward, initiating a contract to be created with customer’s profile information loaded in. The appropriate sales manager can be alerted of the pending deal via email notification, and they can apply their digital signature from their mobile device.

Business Process Automation in the Field or the Firm

Workflow engines like OnTask often play an assistive role in a business process instead of handling the entire task. Business Process Automation (BPA) technology can do the heavy lifting in a variety of organizations. For example, you can streamline the new-hire onboarding experience to ensure an employee’s first day is a confidence-building one. Devices, business applications, and other resources can be prepared and ready by establishing a repeatable set of tasks for IT departments and HR advisors to complete.

Gartner predicted that businesses would invest approximately $1.3 billion in process automation in 2019. Forrester forecasts that there will be over twice that invested in 2021. If you are building a business case for process automation in your organization, here are some proof points you should incorporate.

Automate Your Business Processes

Some businesses hesitate to automate business processes. Yet process automation can enable employees to work smarter, not harder. A recent study by Forbes and Future Workplace found that though 93% of employees are ready to embrace AI and automation in their work, only 6% of HR professionals adopted AI technologies into their workflows. HR departments are often the epicenter of document-centric activities in a business, such as offer letters, or termination notices.

Employees are often enthusiastic about the automation of high-volume, low value tasks they don’t want to do. They often become more engaged in their role because they can focus more on the work they love to do. The kind of work they were seeking when they interviewed for their job.

Your employees are most fulfilled when they do the kind of work which:

Offers solutions to real needs in the marketplace

Brings in more revenue for their business and commissions for their bank account

Allows them to be creative, or take a leadership role

Protects their fellow employees and business interests

BPA enables employees to spend more time interacting with each other, and less time staring fixedly at screens to complete time-consuming data entry tasks.

Reducing Work Overtime, Increasing Productivity and Job Satisfaction

Take, for example, the many ways process automation can streamline the complexity of forms and data entry of reporting. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Office Space” when the boss asked everybody to come in on Saturday to get real work done because of the complexity of their TPS reports, you’ll appreciate what we mean.

Process workflows can transform a process such as a sales proposal approval request (which was once a long email with copious detail) into a simplified form. That form can be submitted by one-click approval to a manager for a digital signature on their any device. The workflow can then trigger an activity in a CRM application like Salesforce.com, and move the opportunity ahead in the sales funnel.

Are you ready to experiment with a process automation platform which is easy to implement, configure, and integrates with your existing business applications?